Businessweek Archives

Secrecy Is Poison

August 11, 2005

Business owners tend to be very secretive. They don’t tell anybody anything. As a consequence, it becomes very, very lonely to be an owner-manager of your own successful business. It’s very difficult to give information to people if you feel they’re going to misuse it or abuse it or make judgments about you because of it.

But without telling advisers and managers what your real problems are, they can’t help, and you wind up being totally unable to delegate. It all goes back to secrecy. It’s an epidemic among business owners, and it doesn’t matter what level or what age, they learn it early and never get rid of it.